Elite Athletes' Brains Bigger in Some Areas

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Elite Athletes' Brains Bigger in Some Areas

In the world of sports, the speed and accuracy with which athletes make split-second decisions often separates triumph from failure, and in that domain, athletes really are geniuses. Just like the muscles of the body, their brains operate as finely tuned machines: Increasing evidence supports the idea that there are measurable differences in the size not only of their biceps but certain areas of their brains.

In a new study published last month in PLoS ONE, a research team led by Jing Luo from the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences compared the brains of elite divers to those who were not involved in intense physical training or professional sport.

To offset the chances that differences found deep within the noggins of the group were due to anything other than athletic prowess, the researchers made sure all the subjects were right-handed, roughly the same age, and had the same amount of education.

By scanning the subjects in an MRI tube, the researchers were able to take high-resolution snapshots of the structure of the brain. Luo’s group then analyzed the scans, measuring the thickness of the outermost layers of the brain in different locales –- sections that previous studies had linked to learning and processing movement. The researchers indeed found distinct differences between the brains of elite athletes and their less-physically inclined counterparts.

The finding that the pro divers have beefier brains in these locations compared to non-athletes parallels research done in musicians, which confirmed that structural brain differences exist between experts and those who couldn’t play a lick.

Still, on its own, this finding wouldn’t tell whether the mastery of a sport bulks up the brain, or if those born with more brain material in certain regions are the ones predetermined to excel in sports in the first place.

However, in one of the brain areas studied, the researchers found that the number of years each athlete competed as a diver nearly predicted how thick the subject’s brain would be. If the results of this small study hold, there may be some biological truth to the adage, “practice makes perfect.” It's as if each year of sports experience becomes neatly folded as a new layer of neurons atop previously mastered skills, physical knowledge, and competition know-how that have already been crammed into the brain.

While athletes may be hardwired for physical achievement, sports fans are built to be statistics nerds. For most, it started innocently enough as a kid, glancing over stats like a player’s height, weight and batting average on the back of a baseball card. Now, it’s morphed into adults with a full-blown obsession, poring over troves of sports data placed at their fingertips.

Today’s box scores are only feeding the addiction, incorporating newly contrived measures like efficiency, which adjusts appropriately for positives and negatives, thus:

These findings provide a small glimpse of how biometric and neurological data may one day be used to gauge a player’s ability and performance. Granted, there’s still a lot of work to be done in understanding exactly what’s going on in an athlete’s head.

So, while we won’t see Albert Pujols’ brainwaves appear in a game recap anytime soon, and next year’s NFL combine won’t be swapping out 40-yard dash times for a player’s neuromuscular-electrical-activity reading in the scouting report, research studies like this are putting us increasingly closer to understanding the origins of athleticism in the brain.